Deliberate Practice with Chess (and Computers)
Friday, January 22nd, 2010Jonah Lehrer pointed out a profile of Magnus Carlsen, the youngest chess player to achieve a number one world ranking. Lehrer delves right into deliberate practice with this thought.
One of the fascinating elements of Carlsen’s talent is that he’s learned the game by playing computer chess, matching his wits against advanced algorithms. The end result is a prodigy who’s amassed an unprecedented amount of deliberate practice at an early age, as he’s able to play multiple games on the same machine at the same time. Computers, in other words, have accelerated the pace of his chess education.
Which makes me wonder if that has any other areas where the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice can be achieved or “quickened” by computers. Poker? Computer Programming?
The part that really got my attention was when Lehrer – who you should bookmark, real talk – points out the correlation between deliberate practice and intuition.
experts naturally depend on the emotions generated by their experience. Their prediction errors – all those mistakes they made in the past – have been translated into useful knowledge, which allows them to tap into a set of accurate feelings they can’t begin to explain.
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The software allows him to play more chess, which allows him to make more mistakes, which allows him to accumulate experience at a prodigious pace.

